Being African In America



Parul Sehgal interviews Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an author born in Nigeria who has lived in the US off and on since age 19, about how she handled race in her book Americanah:

CNA: Race is, I think, the subject that Americans are most uncomfortable with. (Gender, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion are not as uncomfortable.) This is an American generation raised with the mantra: DO NOT OFFEND. And often honesty about race becomes synonymous with offending someone. …

I wanted very much to write an honest book. … I do realize that there is a certain privilege in my position as an outsider, a foreigner, somebody who is not an American. I am really looking in from the outside. I became fascinated by race when I came to the U.S. I still am. I am fascinated by the many permutations of race, especially of blackness, since that is the identity I was assigned in America.

PS: You give [Americanah character] Ifemelu a similar line: “How many other people had become black in America?” Was it a specific moment for you? Did you resent it? Embrace it?

CNA: At first I resented it. A few weeks into my stay in the U.S., an African American man in Brooklyn called me “sister,” and I recoiled. I did not want to be mistaken for African American. I hadn’t been long in the U.S., but I had already bought into the stereotypes associated with blackness. I didn’t want to be black. I didn’t yet realize that I really didn’t have a choice.

Then my resentment turned to acceptance. I read a lot of African American history. And if I had to choose a group of people whose collective story I most admire today, then it would be African Americans. The resilience and grace that many African Americans brought to a brutal and dehumanizing history is very moving to me. Sometimes race enrages me, sometimes it amuses me, sometimes it puzzles me.

I’m now happily black and now don’t mind being called a sister, but I do think that there are many ways of being black. And when I am in Nigeria, I never think of myself as black.

Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, is seen above.

(Hat tip: Paper Trail)

Highly Classified Capitalism

Drake Bennett and Michael Riley describe the business model of Booz Allen:

Rich contractor salaries create a classic public-private revolving door. They pull people from government intelligence, deplete the ranks, and put more experience and knowledge in the private sector, which makes contractors even more vital to the government. “Now you go into government for two or three years, get a clearance, and migrate to one of the high-paying contractors,” says Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. That’s what Snowden did. “You have to have a well-developed sense of patriotism to turn that money down,” Aftergood says.

As a result, says [William] Golden, the headhunter, a common complaint in spy agencies is that “the damn contractors know more than we do.” That could have been a factor in the Snowden leak—his computer proficiency may have allowed him to access information he shouldn’t have been allowed to see. Snowden is an anomaly, though. What he did with that information—copying it, getting it to the press, and publicly identifying himself as the leaker—cost him his job and potentially his freedom, all for what appear so far to be idealistic motives. The more common temptation would be to use knowledge, legally and perhaps not even consciously, to generate more business.

The Painted Page

dish_ekaterinapanikanova

For her series Errata Corrige, artist Ekaterina Panikanova creates a canvas out of old books:

Using old books and various antiquated texts, Panikanova proceeds to apply her dark markings across the multiple volumes of published words and images.

Like a hidden message or puzzle, her works are applied across unspecified pages on each book. Furthermore, with some of her paintings (which are more like installations), there is a puzzling three-dimensionality to them as the pages are not bound down. Instead, they flow freely and add not only layers, but also a sense of texture to the piece.

Recent Dish on visual art crafted from books here.

(Image courtesy of Ekaterina Panikanova)

The World’s Hidden Refugees

In honor of World Refugee Day, Caitlin Dewey calls our attention to internally displaced people (IDP), populations fleeing conflict without crossing borders who are thus “without the benefit of an international sanctuary”:

IDPs aren’t always as visible as refugees, perhaps because their growing numbers don’t swell international camps or burden neighboring countries. But … refugee numbers have mostly stayed stable over the past five years, despite devastating conflicts in Syria, Mali and the Congo. It’s the number of IDPs that continues to grow year-over-year: up to 17.7 million in 2012, from 15.5 million the year before. Some estimates put that number even higher — the International Displacement Monitoring Centre cites 28.8 million IDPs in 2012, its highest ever recorded. …

All displaced people are vulnerable. But internally displaced people can face particular challenges, advocates say, because they often depend primarily on their own government for support, even when that government is the thing displacing them. And international aid groups that work with IDPs often have to go through national governments to get help to the displaced.

Harold Maass adds some perspective:

The number of people around the world who have been forced to flee home due to war or some other life-threatening crisis hit a 19-year high in 2012, according to a new report by the United Nations’ refugee office. In all, 45.2 million people have been displaced by conflict and crisis. “This means one in each 4.1 seconds,” says Antonio Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. “So each time you blink, another person is forced to flee.”

Elizabeth Ferris applauds UN efforts, but argues that they won’t be enough:

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) does a wonderful job, by and large, in responding to immediate humanitarian needs of refugees and in many cases of IDPs, but UNHCR alone can’t find solutions for the world’s refugees and IDPs. Concerted action is needed by governments, development actors and private citizens to find solutions for refugees and IDPs. Finding solutions for people who have been displaced for years is hard work and political commitment is needed. World Refugee Day reminds us of the urgent need to redouble efforts to bring an end to displacement wherever possible and as soon as possible. It should be completely unacceptable that today a third generation of refugees is being born in Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.

How Much Do Helmets Help? Ctd

A reader writes:

I can’t remember if I saw this on the Dish or somewhere else in my RSS feed, but it’s a pretty ingenious product from a Swedish company: An inflatable helmet that triggers based on the occurrence of an accident. Very cool. It’s rated at the same safety standards that the EU requires of traditional helmets. Seems to me that this is the kind of product that may help alleviate the behavioral issues suggested in your post.  You don’t “feel” like you are wearing a helmet.  Drivers don’t “know” you’re wearing a helmet.  But you have the safety without looking like a dweeb (which is why so many people opt out of helmets in the first place). At $600 bucks, it’s not ready for the everyday market, but hopefully they’ll manage to scale up with the financial backing they have received, so it becomes a practical investment.

By the way, in a little “life imitates art” moment, the entire concept was predicted in Snow Crash, the great cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, back in 1992.

The Right Goes Silent On Marriage Equality

Barro studies the right-wing media’s response to Murkowski announcing that she supports marriage equality:

Nothing at National Review, the Weekly Standard, Human Events, the Washington Free Beacon, or the American Spectator. Breitbart.com ran two Associated Press stories. WorldNetDaily ran an NBC News story. The Daily Caller and RedState mentioned Murkowski in pieces about immigration reform, but nothing on gay marriage.

The only conservative outlet I found covering Murkowski was the Washington Examiner, which ran a straightforward news story about her announcement.

Four years ago, it was hard to imagine Republican senators supporting gay marriage. It was even harder to imagine conservative media outlets having no reaction at all to them doing so.

He believes that “the national conservative media is done with engaging on the issue.” Timothy Kincaid likewise notes how the debate over marriage has shifted:

[I]t seems to me that we have entered a phase in which one can be “not ready” or “not convinced” or “not yet evolved” on the issue of marriage equality. That’s simply opinion. But to be actively opposed suggests a character flaw, something with a whiff of nastiness and maybe even vile. The public – right and left – seem to have decided that you can support gay marriage or you can not support gay marriage, but you can’t oppose gay marriage any longer.

So more and more, those who can safely be assumed to favor heterosexual superiority simply choose to say nothing. Instead of defending their God-given moral view, they announce their support for states’ rights, defer to the wisdom of the courts, or just change the subject.

The Appeal Of Steampunk

“The reason Steampunk is important is not what it says about the Victorian Age, or even what that age was,” writes Nick Harkaway. “What’s important is why people like it now”:

The reason Steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale. To unpack that: steam technology is blunt-force industrial, superficially uncomplex, intuitive technology. Nothing in its operation is mysterious. Expanding steam pushes pistons, power is delivered by mechanical driveshafts. Every aspect of it is open to anyone with even a very basic knowledge of physics, or just a curious mind, because the logic of its function is visible.

The sophisticated technologies with which we live now – cellular phones, laptops, even radio and television – require an understanding or at least an acceptance of objects we can never apprehend directly in any way.

Malkin Award Nominee

“The American Spectator is under the watchful eye of the Obama Administration! Since January 1, 2013, federal government has been on the spectator.org website 81,164 times, with the IRS, Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security leading the way. It’s true The American Spectator has seen the likes of Barack Obama before. Arrogant, unfailingly sure of his own righteousness, and willing to do anything to hold on to the reins of power — even going so far as to encourage and oversee the harassment of his administration’s critics, as we’ve seen in the recent revelations about the IRS targeting conservative groups,” – a pitch to contribute by the American Spectator.

Notice how the ugly and utterly unsubstantiated smear of Obama-As-Nixon is now repeated as fact.